SAN FRANCISCO -- Google is nearly done with its VP9 video technology, and it wants the world to use it.

At its Google I/O conference Wednesday, company employees made the case for the royalty-free, open-source technology as a higher-quality alternative to today's dominant video codec, H.264. Moving to VP9 -- available now in testing on Chrome and YouTube -- will save bandwidth costs.

"If you adopt VP9, as you can very quickly, you'll have tremendous advantages over anyone else out there using H.264 or VP8, (its predecessor)," said VP9 engineer Ronald Bultje in a talk here at Google's developer conference. "You can save about 50 percent of bandwidth by encoding your video with VP9 vs. H.264."

Halving network usage is a great incentive to adopt VP9, but there are a lot of caveats.

One problem is that Google is moving very fast. Software such as Web browsers on PCs can be updated rapidly, but it's harder and slower work to build hardware support into chips so mobile phones can decode video without crushing battery life. The industry barely has started coping with VP9's predecessor, VP8, which has been on the market for three years.

Another big issue is that VP9 isn't competing only against H.264, a codec that's about a decade old. It also must reckon with HEVC, aka H.265, a standard that's now complete and that has the potential to spread as widely as H.264.

Just as VP9 doubles the image quality over VP8 for a given number of bits per second -- the bit rate -- H.265 doubles the H.264 quality. Bultje said that H.265 image quality outperforms VP9 by about 1 percent overall, though there's a lot of variability from one video to the next, based on Google's tests so far.

But there's another big part of the VP9 sales pitch: no royalty payments. VP9 is free to use, unlike H.264. HEVC/H.265 also will be free to use once the licensing organization MPEG LA finishes up its patent royalty plans. Google sees that as an unacceptable financial burden for startups, programmers, schools, and others who might want to launch a video project on the Internet.

"We have to make sure they're not writing $5 [million] or $6 million dollar checks every year to standards bodies," said Matt Frost, senior business product manager for the Chrome Web Media Team.

About the author

Stephen Shankland has been a reporter at CNET since 1998 and covers browsers, Web development, digital photography and new technology. In the past he has been CNET's beat reporter for Google, Yahoo, Linux, open-source software, servers and supercomputers. He has a soft spot in his heart for standards groups and I/O interfaces.
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